dk49

Marvin said:

dk49 said:

Rumours work in favour of the product to build some anticipation only upto a certain extent. After that, people start losing interest in that product.

It won't change interest in the product when it's released if it's well made. AR done right will change the way people use computers. Even with highly portable computers/tablets/smartphones, people still sit hunched over them locked into computer-mode. With AR the computer conforms to the environment of the user. It's the next human-computer interface and can only be superseded by a computer-mind interface, which would have largely the same interaction model that AR has.

A lot of mockups imagine an AR UI outdoors in moving scenarios and they often squeeze the entire UI into the visible area like a tiny screen:



but prolonged use will likely still be in static positions, just more flexible scenarios than current devices allow and it allows the entire environment space to be used:



It can give you multiple 60" displays to put content on or have items floating everywhere. Emails, notifications can be out of view until they trigger and the user would turn to look at them or slide the entire environment over.

They'd have to have a desirable form factor for a lot of people to wear while still providing an immersive experience.



There are a lot of decisions to make to get a product that will work well and technology has to be sufficiently advanced to do this. All of the groundwork is being laid - Lidar, motion tracking, high density displays, efficient Apple Silicon, machine learning hardware, depth processing, spatial audio, computational imaging, realistic rendering pipeline.

There is AR hardware out there just now but examples like the Microsoft HoloLens show yet again how they think about product design:



They have the user with the Windows logo/Start Menu on their wrist. This is typical Microsoft where they can't envision anything that doesn't look like Windows. Their Windows phone UI had to look like a start menu. They also don't think about what is compelling for people to use these products for. Apple's products focus on empowering creatives - music, movies, art, photography. Apple's AR product will do the same and if they do it right, it will have as much of an impact as the iPhone.

There's very little concrete to go on from the talk about AR but that was true of the original iPhone where people were trying to imagine what a cellular iPod would do. AR can do things that will blow people's minds. It can bring people back from the dead in virtual form, it can store a face model of people when they were younger and remap it onto their older face in real-time (1:37):



or change people into Disney characters:



People can try on clothes virtually in a way that is practical, teachers can take classrooms back to different eras in time, movies can feel like being at a personal cinema or even inside the movie. There's so much more that can be done with AR than what has been seen so far. What people think about AR now will matter as much as what people thought about smartphones before 2007.

bluefire1 said:

Am I one of the few who’s not excited about AR?